Reading My Manuscript Aloud Is Torture

Yesterday I spent approximately five hours reading my manuscript aloud. It was torture. I don't want to keep going.

There's little to recommend this story, unfortunately. I thought it was great when I was writing it, but something about it isn't right. 

Here's the deal: When I received the same gentle criticisms of my previous books, that the stories were too superficial (that's my interpretation of the reviews), I vowed to adapt my writing style to deepen my narratives. That superficiality, combined with time jumps, was dooming my stories. It's probably nitpicking to point out that these were novellas, and thus "lighter reads", but I feel a need to defend myself.

That said, if I was going to write an entire novel this time, another approach was needed. But I veered too far in the opposite direction. I determined to avoid time jumps all together and instead write chronologically. Well, guess what? Something doesn't happen in every scene! It would be like writing about an average day in your life, where every two minutes some big blowup occurs. Granted, it would make for a fascinating read, but wholly improbable. So, I wrote scenes in which I tried to have something happen, but not much actually did. They're boring! Time jumps would have been far better.

As I listened, I found myself asking, what's the purpose? Is there a point to this? And making these "nothing" scenes even worse, I included unnecessary minutia. I'm SO sick of reading about the drummer kicking off a song or another character tuning his guitar. Who cares? It's boring and redundant. I bet it happened at least ten times throughout the course of the story.

As far as deepening the narrative, oh, no; I was too busy focusing on what came next. The few passages in which the main character stops to ponder her life circumstances comprise all of about two sentences each. There's too much to do! She has to keep moving! 

About the only good thing I can say about this manuscript is that my secondary characters are interesting; at least some of them are. 

Even by avoiding time jumps, the story still moves too fast. Fast, yet slow. Plodding, but with tons of different scenes.

I suppose I have to finish reading the whole thing, but I won't know what to do with it after that. My notes, which started out by addressing a few specific issues, now read, "this part is boring". Not exactly helpful. I'm not saying there aren't good parts, but no reader is going to hang around long enough to get to them.

I honestly don't know if this novel can be salvaged. What's really sad is that I was expecting to sit back and listen to an enjoyable story. I deluded myself when I was writing it ~ I truly believed it was good. It's like in Good Morning, Viet Nam, when Lt. Hauk says, "In my heart, I know I'm funny."

Unfortunately, I don't think this one is fixable.